In a retro SF setting, Derick and Tina are freelance archaeologists. He’s a veteran soldier but she’s a poor little rich girl who thinks it’s all an adventure…
(I was going to blog about stuff related to Swords Versus Tanks (so about swords and tanks, mostly) but I’m busy editing Episode 3 (“Pyramid of Blood”) and NaNoWriMo is here…)
The writing process is always a cycle of trial and error, call it “create and tinker.” Humans are better at problem solving than inventing in a vacuum. No surprise, then, that the real story building usually happens in the tinker phase. Unfortunately, most new thoughts apply to characters and plot, e.g. we look at the scene we just wrote and realize it would be better with ninjas, and if the main character lacked her right foot. Sure we can write the rest of the book as if that were now true, but as the changes accrue, most of our first draft becomes condemned, which seems… inefficient. This is why I like outlining.
So, here instead is a hacked-down approach that should still help…
First, Review Your Objectives
Your aim is to produce a 50,000 word novel in a month. Allowing an average of 5K words a chapter, that means a mere 10 chapters. Each chapter comprises 1 big scene or 2 regular scenes.
I’m delighted to have the chance to introduce you to the voice of the audible.com audiobook edition of This Gulf of Time and Stars, as well as the Trade Pact trilogy. Hi Allyson!
Allyson: Hi Julie! It is truly a pleasure to be having a conversation with you about the Trade Pact world. Ordinarily, the only person I’m able to speak with about a book is the engineer who’s recording me. So this is a real treat!
For me too. I didn’t expect to be involved with the audiobook process at all, let alone meet the actor! You and I have had a few phone calls to discuss vocabulary over the four books. Anyone who clicks on the sample of the latest will know at once what a wonderful job you’ve done, Allyson. I know you prepared well in advance. You told me you listened to your own recordings of A Thousand Words For Stranger, Ties of Power, and To Trade the Stars before you tackled Gulf. What did that help you accomplish?
Thanks so much for your kind words. To be honest, although I tuned into a few choice sections of the other two titles, I only had time to listen to Tradeall the way through, prior to recording Gulf. But I always take copious notes about character descriptions, vocal characteristics, accent choices, pronunciations, etc. whenever I prep a book. So I was able to refer back to the index cards I’d previously created for the trilogy and create a spreadsheet that would allow for quick and easy reference in the booth. It had, however, been three years since I’d last entered Trade Pact space, as it were, and there’s nothing like hearing long passages of dialogue to refresh my mind. Listening also reminded me of plot points I hadn’t thought about in a long time, which allowed me to pick up where the story left off once I actually began narrating Gulf. I try to be mindful of the fact that listeners sometimes elect to hear books in a series back-to-back. So I need to make the transitions between those stories as seamless as possible.
Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: A Closer Look at Some POV Styles Commonly Used in Fantasy (Starting with Some Intriguing Uses of 2nd Person)
This is Part 3 in the Choosing Your Narrative POV Series.
Most English teachers will tell you there are 3 Point of View (POV) forms: 1st Person, which uses the I pronoun; 2nd Person, which uses the you pronoun; and 3rd Person, which uses the he, she or they pronouns. That’s true, as far as it goes. But like a good jazz improvisation, there are a lot of unique riffs that can be built around these three foundations, often mixing, matching, and masquerading as one of these three forms.
My friend and former co-editor Eric Cherry and I once brainstormed more than 25 POV variations, and realized we could have come up with even more. But over the course of this series of articles, I’m going to highlight and explore eight of them.
The heroes paraded back into the village, leading their mules laden with treasure liberated from a nearby dungeon. As they entered the small village in the middle of nowhere, they soon split up to take care of their spoils. Three of them met with the local jeweler, presenting him with the choicest gems and fine jewelry they’d acquired on their adventure. The others descended on the local merchants to sell off the more mundane treasures while the sorcerer carried the magic items the party did not need to the convenient wizard’s tower, turning them into useful gold coins. The rogue slipped away to meet with the local guildmaster to make his abeyance and provide him with a cut of the treasure. The guildmaster smiled at the bounty and passed on a list to the rogue for items to search for in his further adventures.
That evening, the sounds of merriment filled the air of the village. A crowd had gathered at the local tavern and the barmaids whirled away from those patrons who became too “inquisitive” as they delivered the mugs of ale and heaping piles of food to those assembled. The female barbarian noted with approval the new bartender was a strapping young man who was returning her admiring looks. Only the poor watchman was left out, standing his lonely guard as he patrolled the streets of the village, staring out into the darkness that hid who knows what.
If you’re like me, that scene sounds awfully familiar. It’s appeared too often in bad fantasy stories, bad fantasy movies, and WAY too many role playing games. “But Rich,” you say, “the party has to have somewhere to spend their treasure. Otherwise, there’s no point in giving it out?”
And my response is, “You’re absolutely right, but for the wrong reasons.” Let me explain what I mean. (Good, otherwise this would be a darn short blog entry – Editor).
Like Winter, NaNoWriMo is coming and aspiring writers are even now planning to do a Frazetta on the whole business of writing a novel. This is great — momentum is all — but it’s way too easy to grind to a halt or lose time going round in circles trying to reinvent the wheel.
I wrote a book on all this, but some of my previous blog entries might also help you avoid dead ends and rampage through your novel to the very end — I promise you both an affirming and life changing experience.
So, here they are in digest form:
Some Writing Advice That’s Mostly Useless (And Why): The following writing advice is mostly useless — “Work on your motivation,” “Revise, revise, revise,” “Have a chaotic life,” “Just write,” “Know grammar and critical terms,” “Practice skills in isolation.”
World Building Historical Fiction using Military Thinking: Don’t fall down the rabbit hole of research or worldbuilding. Instead use a layered approach, focussing your world building as you descend from Strategic (villas exist and can be raided for supplies), through Operational (this villa sits on this ground amidst these fields), to Tactical (here is the ground plan of the villa and here are the people guarding it) level.
“Aliosha Popovich” by Kate Baylay, from a collection of Russian Fairy Tales. Used by kind permission of the artist.
Back in the age of print magazines, I made my first professional sale to a fellow named John O’Neill who published a gorgeous quarterly called Black Gate. We went through three deep revisions on that manuscript, a process we both enjoyed enough that, after I finally produced a version of “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” good enough for John to buy, he asked if I had anything else featuring that heroine. And I did. To our surprise, my novella “The Imlen Bastard” needed only a little polish to be ready for print. And so it took its place in the publication queue. Forthcoming from Black Gate, I said of it in my author bio all over the internet, for a few years.
Those years were hard on print magazines, and they weren’t much kinder to online fiction markets. “The War of the Wheat Berry Year” appeared in BG‘s last print issue. Ultimately, John stopped publishing fiction online before “The Imlen Bastard” could make its debut here.
But to me it’ll always be a Black Gate story.
So when I found an artist, Kate Baylay, whose work felt like my favorite old BG print covers — luscious, menacing, full of subtle story implications — I knew I’d found the right cover artist for “The Imlen Bastard.” Everything else I wanted to do with the self-publishing project that has grown up around the novella came together for me quickly after that. Best of all, Kate Baylay embraced the manuscript, and we’ve had so much fun going over the story together to find the most iconic moments for interior illustrations.
Then I enlisted superstar editor Betsy Mitchell — now retired from Del Rey after a career of editing people like Naomi Novik, Michael Chabon, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler — to give the novella an editorial boost. I figured, there’s a difference between standing as the longest piece in a magazine issue and standing alone as a book. I’m still kind of amazed that she took me on as a freelance client, when she’s in a position to work only on manuscripts she really enjoys. So that boded well.
At first, we all agreed that I’d launch a Kickstarter campaign over the summer, but then I got shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award. I held off on self-publishing for a few months so I’d know whether to say Finalist or Winner in my promotional material. After the award, I needed to readjust my hubris levels — a story that’s done me the kindness of coming to me to be written deserves the best promotion I can give it, and now I had to work up more brazenness than ever before on my stories’ behalf. Brazenness is harder than it looks. This month, with the thank-you notes for the award all written and sent out, and a trophy to feature in my Kickstarter video, it was finally time.
I clicked on the launch button at noon. You can find the campaign here.
This week’s Pro-Tip comes from Alyssa Wong, a Nebula-, Shirley Jackson-, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and 2013 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.
How Do I Know When a Piece is Ready to Send Out?
I think it’s important to have a handful of beta readers/critique partners whose taste and judgment you really trust. Personally, I prefer people who are very, very critical readers, but who also like my work and understand what I’m trying to accomplish in a piece when it’s a hot mess.
When two separate, very picky readers suggest that it’s ready to send out, I usually do it. That doesn’t mean that I have to agree 100% with the changes they suggest, but knowing that they feel it’s ready really helps me.
Alyssa’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Black Static, among others. And just out this month, in Nightmare Magazine’s Queers Destroy Horror! Special Issue, is her story “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” about “living in the big city and eating love in all the wrong places.”
Her website is crashwong.net, and her Twitter unsername is @crashwong.
This is Part 2 in the Choosing Your Narrative POV Series.
Who is Your Point of View Character?
It Might Not Be Your Protagonist. The most common POV choice, particularly for short stories, is for the protagonist to be the POV character. Stories of this type can be written in 1st Person, or Tight Limited 3rd. (More on these terms later in this article.) In very rare cases, they can also be told disguised in 2nd Person.
Your protagonist is the one facing the problem and must be the one who takes the final action that solves the problem and saves the day.
It often makes sense for the protag to be the POV. But there are times when an author chooses to use a sidekick or an observer as the POV character, even when choosing to write the story in 1st Person.
Last time I wrote about cozy mysteries and whether we might have the equivalent subgenre in Fantasy or SF, and I got a couple of suggestions among the comments that intrigued me more than a little. Now obviously, our version of such a thing wouldn’t have the same conventions and elements as the cozy mystery – there likely wouldn’t be a murder, for one thing – and fellow BG blogger Sarah Avery reminded me of a cozy convention I’d forgotten, that the protagonist is never in any real danger. That doesn’t hold true for any subgenre of either Fantasy or SF, where every character is playing for keeps. As readers, we might feel sure that the main character(s) won’t die, but we often find that living has cost them a great deal.
So, are there Fantasy and SF equivalents to the cozy mystery?
One suggestion we batted around a little was the idea of the “intimate” Fantasy novel. This would be one in which the personal stakes might be very high, but in which the global stakes are minor, or don’t exist at all. This is less unusual for our genres then it used to be.
Just by chance the novel that reached the top of my to-be-read pile most recently was Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to this one, but I’m now recommending it to anyone who holds still long enough – including you. Right from the start, as you can see from the cover art I’ve included, the novel has been compared to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and in that manner, it’s certainly “intimate” in the sense that we’re talking about.
Ahead of her trip to the Midwest for writerly things, this Nebula and World Fantasy awards nominee offers up two Pro-Tips for the blog this week. Chicagoans will have the chance to hear Cat Rambo read from her debut fantasy novel, Beasts of Tabat, at Gumbo Fiction Salon on Wed. Oct. 7th.
I have trouble finding the right starting point for my story. Got any suggestions?
Start writing in the middle of it and worry about the beginning later. Often the beginning is something I don’t finalize till the very last end of the draft, and often looking at how the story ends will provide me with ideas for an ending that returns in some way to a moment, location, theme, or other structure from the beginning and helps create a sense of closure. At the end of a story, you need to hear the click of its door swinging shut, and part of creating that is opening the door into it in the right way.
What’s one thing I can do to improve my writing?
Read it out loud. This is perhaps the single best piece of advice I can give any writer other than get your butt in the chair and start writing. Reading out loud will help you create something that sounds good in a reader’s head, as well as to catch all sorts of errors, typos, and ungraceful things.
